Technical Abstract:
An essential step to understanding the genomic biology of any organism is to comprehensively survey its transcriptome. We present the Bovine Gene Atlas (BGA) a compendium of over 7.2 million unique 20 base Illumina DGE tags representing 100 tissue transcriptomes collected primarily from L1 Dominette, the Hereford cow whose genome was sequenced, her father, and male and female offspring. A GBrowse view of the alignment of the BGA tag data to a genome draft assembly can be examined at http://www.agbase.msstate.edu/bovineatlas, and we provide an overview of how to use this database schema for positional and functional queries. Consistency of the BGA tags with current gene models and demonstration of a novel informational entropy analysis that facilitates recognition of tissue specific expression with respect to chromosomal position will be presented.